Our obsession with green lawns essay

In time, however, revolutions laid these presumptions low. Weeds flourish wherever we clear land, dig, or farm. She began by trying to tally how much water people use on their lawns. People also need to actually learn a little bit about the ecology of their yard.

But looked at it from a very different vantage point, as a growing number of environmentally-concerned people do, the lawn is a wasteful, polluting, conformist, ridiculously time-consuming and increasingly anachronistic effort to dominate nature whatever the cost or consequences.

Maybe a tennis court.

In East Hampton, the lawns were green like the purest idea of the color, so that they softened the day, the conversation, the people, the whole apparatus of life around them, giving the place an Edenic sense of newness, as though one had stumbled through a doorway into some hidden elsewhere, untouched by the sins of the ongoing world.

We waste so much water.

We are shown that a green, weedless, pest free turfgrass lawn is within our reach, year-round, regardless of where we live.

World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East.

There are no Keep Off The Grass signs. The intellectual Bacon was not much of a hands-on dibbler — no muddy fingernails for him — but he was gripped by the cerebral side of gardening.

A system of currency functions because enough people collectively buy into a mass delusion, an agreed-upon psychosis, that the cost of opting out of the belief becomes quite literally too high.

A History of American Obsession. To love Central Park is to tacitly approve of Robert Moses and to approve of the politicians who evicted nearly two thousand people from their homes and razed entire, functioning communities with schools and farms and families in order to create a vision of a green world supposedly free and open to all, who, like the Dutch settlers before them, destroyed a natural world in order to buy and sell a facsimile of one.

These two words carried a lot of weight. This covers lawn supplies, lawn services, and so on. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. Credit goes to France's Louis XIV who first demonstrated with his little 17th-century project at Versailles that prestige befell the man who could control nature's wantonness.

They re-emerge ready to mate and marry, ready to be visible within the requirements of a patriarchal society.

He also saved Central Park, and is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the park as it exists in current iteration, in much the same way Rudy Giuliani is responsible for the present-day family-friendly Times Square. A History of an American Obsession. If you have a horrible drought, okay, I get it.

After 30 seconds, we found snails.

We reduced our water usage by 19 percent without having to fine anybody, without having to crack down with the water police, but by inspiring people through public education and rebates, giving them free cisterns, changing out their toilets, all those sorts of things.

The war against weeds Half of all the plants growing in America have been classified as weeds. Sharon Yiesla, plant clinic assistant at the Morton Arboretum, said she regularly encounters people like the new me.

After a fresh application of cash in the form of power raking, core aeration and overseeding, the lawn fell obediently into place. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure.What’s behind our collective obsession with weed-free expanses of velvety green?

of glory: America's love affair with lawns. million. Fungi live most of their lives underground, hidden from our eyes. Here in the arid Southwest they are easy to miss, only showing themselves for the briefest of moments after rains, or on irrigated lawns and mulched garden beds.

Listen now: Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How Stupid Is Our Obsession With Lawns?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.) Nearly two percent of America is grassy green.

Sure, lawns are beautiful and useful and they smell great. A recent trend for concreting over front lawns (to turn them into parking spaces) and the invention of — shudder — plastic grass may suggest that our love affair with lawns is on the wane.

We. Aвтор: Mekan Melyayev Arapahoe Community College, EnglishLittleton, USA, г. Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How Stupid Is Our Obsession With Lawns?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.) Nearly two percent of America is grassy green.